Beach Institute
Historic Site Revitalization
The Beach Institute, one of Savannah's oldest African American cultural institutions, needed a clearer, more welcoming visitor experience without compromising its historic character. Working within preservation requirements and a protected building, a 20-person interdisciplinary team delivered wayfinding, interpretive signage, and digital outreach systems that are in active use at the museum today.
Role: Project Manager, Design Coordinator
Tools: Production Planning, Client Communication, Spatial Design, Environmental Graphics
Status: Final design assets currently in use by Beach Institute
I coordinated a 20-person, three-team studio working across physical design, environmental graphics, and digital outreach. I served as the primary point of contact between the client, faculty advisors, and team leads, set schedules and milestones, and ensured all design decisions aligned with the museum's preservation requirements. I led client presentations and internal reviews to guide the project from early concept through final deliverables.
Exterior sign system installed at the Beach Institute, designed within historic district preservation requirements.
Floor map design and physical installation: large-format wayfinding clarifying circulation through a historically complex building.
Interior interpretive sign design and installed result, with QR codes linking visitors to extended digital content.
My Design Process The Beach Institute, one of Savannah's oldest African American cultural institutions, came to our team with a broad mandate: make the visitor experience clearer, more welcoming, and more visible to the public, without compromising the building's historic character or its significance to the community it serves. Translating that into concrete design decisions required several rounds of client workshops to define what revitalization actually meant in practice, since the museum had limited internal design resources and an open-ended brief. I coordinated a 20-person, three-team studio working simultaneously across physical design, environmental graphics, and digital outreach. My role was to keep those three workstreams aligned with each other and with the client's vision, which meant setting schedules, leading internal reviews, managing client communication, and making judgment calls when the teams pulled in different directions. I also coordinated material selection and vendor quotes for the exterior signage, which required navigating Savannah's historic district preservation requirements. Those regulations constrained both the materials available and the physical dimensions of exterior signage, and weathering had to be factored into every material decision given the building's exposed position. Finding solutions that met preservation standards, held up to the climate, and still read clearly as wayfinding took more iteration than anticipated. The floor map addressed a longstanding circulation problem in a building whose age and layout made it genuinely confusing to navigate. The interior interpretive signage gave the collection deeper context through exhibit plaques with QR codes linking to extended digital content, allowing the museum to layer in information without physically altering the historic fabric of the space. The team also developed a digital outreach framework including a TikTok channel and long-term content plan designed to give the museum a sustainable social presence it could maintain independently after the project concluded. All final design assets were delivered to the Beach Institute and are in active use at the museum today. The project was also documented by the Georgia Historical Society as part of their record of the institution's ongoing revitalization.